When Bernice Davis celebrates her 90th birthday on Jan. 13, she will celebrate a life that has served Arkansas River Valley school systems for nearly 40 years as a teacher, while also making memories.

Bernice taught for 38 years at a combined six schools throughout the Russellville area, including three that are now non-existent. While admittedly shy, she is a natural storyteller. And she has an abundance of stories to tell — some being humorous anecdotes, and some involving tragedy.

In 1984, the last year she taught, she stood at an overhead projector at the front of the class teaching a math lesson when a student raised his hand.

“He said, ‘Mrs. Davis, how old are you?’ and I didn’t lie to him, but I didn’t answer the question either,” she said. “And then he said, ‘You’ve got to be old, because you taught my grandfather.’”

Bernice’s stories are reminiscent of an older, much different River Valley, but one that aged residents might remember fondly. She began her teaching career at Mars Hill Elementary School, which was located on Crow Mountain and is now defunct.

She found teaching immensely rewarding. “Someone once told me that I like young people, and I said, ‘Yes, I do,’” she said. “It thrills me to know when young people do well in school.”

It was a job she got hired for without a college degree, although it wasn’t uncommon at the time. “Now that’s another story,” she said with a smile.

During World War II, a man teaching at the school got a job in California and went to work there. When school started, they were short one teacher. So they hired Bernice.

She taught third-, fourth- and fifth-graders at the school for several years. The school had two classrooms, one for first and second graders and one for third-, fourth- and fifth-graders. There was no cafeteria; kids brought their own lunches.

“I enjoyed teaching there but I didn’t have much to work with,” she said of the school. “We didn’t have a lot of equipment to teach.”

Then she decided to go to college. She registered for classes at Ouchita Baptist University on June 6, 1944, the day of the Normandy invasion in World War II.

“I remember standing in line at the library when I heard about it,” she said.

Times were hard during the war, which saw several people she knew sent overseas to the front. One Saturday she went to speak to Dr. James Grant, then the president of the university, to talk to him about his son. “But he hadn’t heard from him,” she said. “Later, he got the news that he had been killed in action.”

“It was a sad time,” she added.

But there was a silver lining to the incredible amount of casualties the war inflicted — one of them would become her husband. Argle Davis saw significant action during the war, sustaining a leg injury during the Battle of the Bulge. He was also down the hall from Gen. George Patton when Patton died.

Bernice had gone to school with Davis at Pottsville. “He didn’t know me, but I knew him,” she said. When they saw each other again in the summer of 1947, they were both attending Arkansas Tech University. Bernice was staying with her aunt, and would often go to what was then Lemon’s Drugstore during the noon hours.

He began to show up at the store and asked her to ride with him to Tech in his car.

“It took him three times to get me to go with him,” she said.

They married on Jan. 3, 1949, and Argle was still on crutches during the wedding, due to the war injury. They would stay married for 51 years.

Davis’s teaching career spanned a remarkable 38 years that saw her teach at Mars Hill, Mountain Springs — which was a school on Skyline where the Fire Department building now stands — Center Valley, Pottsville, London and Johnson County. Overall, she said, she liked teaching first-graders the most.

“I just love first-graders. They’re pretty honest about telling you how they feel about things,” she said, citing a student who one time told her she looked pregnant.

She told a story involving a student named David, whose last name she forgot. “We were doing a unit over farm animals, and he said, ‘Mrs. Davis, do you know why my dog doesn’t have pups?’ And I bit on it, and I said I didn’t know, and he said, ‘Because he’s a boy dog.’”

She laughed, and then grew solemn as she recounted when David, then a college student attending UCA, was killed in a car wreck.

“I met his mother in the store years later and told her the dog story,” she said. “It thrilled her.”

In her remarkable life spanning two centuries, five wars and 16 presidencies, Bernice has seen many lives begin and end, including her husband’s, who passed away 12 years ago.

But now, Bernice is living at the Wildflower Retirement Community in Russellville, where she’s still making the most of life.

“I like to go,” she said. “Sometimes they think I go too much, but I like spending time with people and being active.”

“You don’t get much going at 90 years old,” she continued. “But I’m glad I’m here. The employees are very good.”

Her birthday party will take place at First Cumberland Presbyterian Church. Although her birthday is in December, the party was postponed because the preacher was going to be out of town and he wanted to attend the party.

She will celebrate her birthday surrounded by friends, filled with remembrances of an earlier time, while looking forward to another year of telling stories and making memories.